The passage of California Proposition 1A (2008) set in motion a complete reconstruction of the railroad between San Jose and San Francisco. This blog exists to discuss compatibility between HSR and Caltrain, integration issues, and the impact on adjoining communities.

The threat was made in this letter (640 kB PDF file) from attorney Gary Patton.

The letter not only complains of the age of the EIR (last circulated for public comment in 2004), but more importantly, it argues that the project has substantially changed and has effectively become part of the peninsula HSR project, by virtue of the MOU signed by Caltrain (a copy of which is attached to the letter) and the funding arrangement whereby HSR funds might pay for a portion of the electrification project.

The implications of this legal threat to the Caltrain electrification project are easy to deduce:

Without a certified EIR, the project is not "shovel-ready";

Without "shovel-readiness" the project is unlikely to benefit from the stimulus funds awarded to the California HSR project;

It is no longer even within Caltrain's purview to prepare an updated EIR;

The construction timeline is likely to be delayed for at least as long as the HSR project, entering service in 2020 in the unlikely event that everything goes smoothly;

The replacement of Caltrain's aging fleet (a large portion of which was acquired circa 1985) will be delayed by several years, likely causing Caltrain to miss the window and undertake early replacement of obsolete equipment with more diesel-hauled trains rather than electric multiple units. You can stop the clock on the HSR project, but you can't stop the clock on aging of equipment.

Danger and Opportunity

With a barrage of lawsuits being lined up against the peninsula HSR project, Caltrain is already getting caught in the crossfire. Any project that enables or facilitates the eventual construction of HSR is seemingly fair game. For better or for worse, Caltrain is now in a shotgun marriage with HSR, enforced by these legal threats, with environmental clearance, engineering and construction likely unable to proceed independently. There is very little that Caltrain can do about this besides duking it out in court.

On the flip side, maybe this is an opportunity to finally undertake the design of a integrated system, where Caltrain and HSR are built as a single project rather than two independent operators awkwardly sharing the same corridor. This blog has always promoted compatibility, whether it be platforms, train control, timetables, to maximize the synergy between the two systems--something in which Caltrain has shown dishearteningly little interest so far. Perhaps this setback of the electrification project will prompt some reflection.

36 comments:

The threat of litigation by the PCL and CCHSR is complete BS. Sure, while the EIR/EIS was under a lengthy review, prop 1A passed and an MOU with CAHSRA was signed. But is the document itself fundamentally different from the draft EIR/EIS? I doubt it. Also, let's not forget that the EIR was about electrifying the line, not grade separating it, which is what is being done by the Authority/Caltrain/FRA. Similarly the issues surrounding Noise/Vibration/Aesthetics/trees etc. were all addressed in the documents. This is simply NIMBY obstructionism at its best or worst, depending on one's opinion.

It helps to think of Caltrain staffers not as professionals, but characters in a Dilbert cartoon. In particular, PHB and Wally, who will go to great lengths to avoid doing any actual work.

For these characters, the threat of lawsuit over Electrification EIR is like a gift from God. Already, they had succeeded in delaying the project for 5 years. The CHSRA had threatened to revive it, but now it is safely back in limbo again.

What is it going to take to get every agency's head out of their asses to get something done? It seems to me political good will is better than smart engineering and NIMBYs believe they have fillibuster power due to the endless lawsuit after lawsuit. I wish we could just point to previous precedent and strike it down immediately but they will question it to death just like the Senate can debate a bill to death.

"It helps to think of Caltrain staffers not as professionals, but characters in ..."

Oh no, don't throw CPUC 26-D at us! That would be the worst thing ever! Then we'd be forced to rebuild all of the platforms at all of our stations at the wrong height, and then later rebuild them again at a second wrong height, and never be able to stop high speed trains at the same stations. Don't do that! It would break our widdle ol' hearts!

Please, Mister FTA, don't whatever you do misplace our files down at the bottom of a big jumble of stuff to go to Goodwill! Really, not big deal with approving our silly ol' little EIR. Just go right ahead with Silicon Valley Rapid Transit Project, even though we were here meekly sitting in line years before, it's OK, we'll just sit quietly over here and wait, really, it's no big deal, don't trouble yourself, really, no, it's nothing.

CPUC, it would be the worst thing in history if it took you 3 years to get back to us about how many inches of space to leave around a 25kv wire. You must have a whole lot of other stuff you'd rather be doing, important stuff for people who matter, stuff to really make a difference somewhere, perhaps even completely revolutionize the whole field of Public Utilities somehow, so, no problem, whenever you feel up to it, but don't strain yourself or anything, OK?

City of Hillsdale, if you ever breathe a hint that maybe you're not exactly sure what shade of concrete you prefer, we're going to not do anything about the easy to build, strategically important, Caltrain passenger benefiting, four track Hillsdale station rebuild and grade separation. Ever. In fact, we'd just have to cancel it. Break our heart, why don't you! It's all really sad, but without Community Consensus and Stakeholder Buy-in on the tinting and texture of the concrete finishes we'd just be leaving ourselves open to terrible consequences.

VTA and MTC! It would be the worst thing ever if you took all that money your voters allocated to our funny ol' Caltrain Dumbarton project and sent it all off to BART. That would be just terrible. Don't even think about it. Not for one minute.

Of course the EIR is now moot. The HSR project is an entirely new enterprise, entailing far more environmental impacts than the original Caltrain-only plan envisioned. Anyone can see that. Does that make the HSR-Caltrain combination impossible to accomplish? Who knows? At the rate Caltrain's finances are fading, the prognosis is not good. Come to think of it, the HSR business plan isn't exactly iron-clad either.

Well, the only things that will be different are that (a) Caltrain may not survive in the short-term, (b) HSR will be built with four tracks along the Peninsula with essentially the same electrified infrastructure as we would have with electrified Caltrain, and (c) Caltrain will hopefully be resurrected in the long-term.

Thanks for having our best interests at heart. Even if there's no transit service on the Peninsula for a decade or two, and even if we end up with only local service and no expresses in 2030, it will all somehow have been worth it.

How about using a different approach. Get the Legislature to exempt Caltrain electrification from CEQA as a jobs bill, and because what Caltrain does right now is irrelevant given that HSR is going to replace the entire infrastructure, anyway...

As we see the nation and it's infrastructure falling apart and/or failing to be upgraded, it's easy to see that this is the United States of America. What's not easy to believe is how we really think we are the greatest country on Earth and put down other nations and their peoples. By many metrics we are among the worst in the first world.

Amen. It's hard to swallow the "we're the greatest nation on earth" pill when our infrastructure is literally falling apart in front of our eyes.

To continue touting the USA as being the best at everything equates to becoming utterly complacent. As long as you say you're the best, you must be right?

Open your eyes, Americans. Travel around a bit and see the rest of the first world. When you compare our healthcare, our transit, our education, our roadways, and our other infrastructure to the rest of the first world, we are *severely* lacking.

Don't do us the disservice of saying we're the best in the world at everything when we're not. These problems will take action to fix. They need attention, money and time. Ignoring them will get us nowhere.

Killing off peninsula rail is not a good place to start, even if HSR will eventually be built. Letting Caltrain die screws the 10s of thousands of peninsula commuters who use it every day. We need to secure the system's future with electrification. Without Caltrain, hwy 101 would get even uglier and anyone without a car would be screwed.

And in 5 years, when oil prices will probably be even higher than in 2008, everyone will be clamoring "why isn't there any public transit on the peninsula??". Someone with a memory longer than that of a fruitfly (ie: longer than the average American's memory) will have to remind them that they let Caltrain die.

So what do we need to keep Caltrain alive? It doesn't seem like all that much. I think a .1% sales tax in the 3 counties it serves would provide far more funding than Caltrain would even know what to do with.

I agree that it's best to be critical of claims of America being "the best", and to be careful in trying to outdo the rest of the world, as the CA-HSR project is to some extent trying to do. But it's also important to recognize that this country does do some things well. One example is freight rail: the US has by far the biggest and most developed freight rail system in the world. Only Russia and China come remotely close, and Europe is trying as hard as they can to make their freight operations more like the US model. And, on the whole, the Northeast Corridor is not too bad either, compared to non-HSR lines in Europe. A top speed of 125 mph and level boarding are both relatively uncommon for intercity trains in Europe. So it's not all bad in this country.

But I think the larger problem is that Europe has been around for generations, and is used to building infrastructure to last for generations, while the US has been a growing country, and has been building infrastructure and institutions for a much shorter time horizon, and to some extent they're predicated on continuing growth. California in particular has always been growing, and thus could afford to rely on a constant stream of newcomers to keep the state finances balanced. Now that the stream of newcomers is gone, the wheels are starting to come off the state budget process, and it remains to be seen if the state can move to a more sustainable model, or if it will become like the formerly prosperous Detroit and collapse on itself. I doubt that will happen though: California, unlike Michigan, at least has the inherent attractiveness of its climate.

Arcady, I don't get the "Europe has been around for generations" bit. Japan hasn't been an industrialized country for longer than the US has; its pre-1850s history is feudal. Hong Kong and Singapore didn't even exist until the 19th century. You'd expect that countries like that would build shoddy infrastructure, but instead their growth has been investment-driven and entailed massive infrastructure investments.

The bit about freight rail is only partly true. American railroads haul the lowest-value goods. If you count the value of the goods carried instead of ton-miles, American freight rail has a 4% modal share. Even if you go by ton-miles, the US is doing about as well as the other countries where geography makes trucking and coastal shipping infeasible: China, Russia, India, and Canada.

And indeed Japan does have a lot of differences in the way some infrastructure is built: for example houses are built to last 30 years. As soon as you pay off your mortgage, you tear down the house because it's life-expired and start over with a new house and new mortgage. And another key difference is that Japan has more or less the same general distribution of population as it always had, as opposed to, say, California, whose population quadrupled in the decade between 1850 and 1860, and whose population was less than that of Manhattan in 1900, but is about 20 times bigger today.

Alon: what I was trying to say is that the geographic center of population distribution hasn't moved much in Japan, whereas in America it has, and quite significantly. I'm sure rural California has a much higher population now than it did 100 years ago, and much of that population came over during the various waves of land speculation. And by the way, railroad infrastructure really is built somewhat differently in Japan compared to Europe. A random look around Google Maps and satellite view shows many more level crossings, and much less space separating rail lines from the surrounding houses. The Shinkansen started out as a way of applying European standards to rail construction in Japan, with standard gauge, shallow curves, and extensive grade separation, as opposed to Japan's low speed, curvy, narrow-gauge lines.

The Shinkansen started out as a way of applying European standards to rail construction in Japan, with standard gauge, shallow curves

European trains in the 50s, which is when they began to plan the Shinkansen, were little better than Japanese trains. An argument could be made that they were using what is now called the Northeast Corridor as their prototype.

Alon: it's not about rural versus urban, it's about the overall geographic spread of population relative to the total area of the country. In 1840, California has 15 times less population than New England, whereas now it has 2.5 times more. I doubt that that sort of shift has happened between, say, any of the islands in Japan. As for the Northeast Corridor, whether or not it was better than most European railroads in the 50s, it was, and is, not a very typical US line, while Europe generally built their mainlines to a fairly high standard early on. And England had 70 mph trains as early as 1848, while Japan didn't exceed that speed until the Shinkansen came about in the 1960s.

I doubt that that sort of shift has happened between, say, any of the islands in Japan.

Japan's population has always been centered in Honshu, but in recent decades it's gotten much more concentrated in the Tokyo-Nagoya-Osaka megalopolis.

As for the Northeast Corridor, whether or not it was better than most European railroads in the 50s, it was, and is, not a very typical US line, while Europe generally built their mainlines to a fairly high standard early on.

Eastern US rail lines were built to fairly high standards early on, and the turn of the century-era cutoffs were built to even higher standards. They were double-tracked and supported speeds approaching 100 mph. It's the Western lines that were built on the cheap, due to low density. In that they weren't much different from the Trans-Siberian Railroad. The difference is that Russia has spent more money upgrading the Trans-Siberian in recent years, so that it's now fully electrified and two-thirds double-tracked.

Nobody would use the technology of the 0 series Shinkansen for that matter.

Sadly, the 0 series weighs less than anything that's legal on FRA-regulated railroads today, unless you count the River Line DMUs.

The RDC weighs 135,000 lbs., i.e. 61 metric tons, still a hair more than the 0 series.

There's no question, the US railroads were technologically advanced back when Budd made the RDC. The knowledge was just forgotten over time: it was easier to conform to crippling regulations than to install PTC, which was what the FRA was trying to get the railroads to do, and nowadays the best technology that can be made in the US is 50 years out of date. (For reference, modern Japanese DMUs usually weigh less than 40 tons.)

Alon Levy wrote:"Eastern US rail lines were built to fairly high standards early on, and the turn of the century-era cutoffs were built to even higher standards. They were double-tracked and supported speeds approaching 100 mph. It's the Western lines that were built on the cheap, due to low density."

Well... not exactly. The early eastern rail lines were built in the pioneering days of railroads, when nobody knew what the hell they were doing (1830-1850 or so). This left us with some really dreadful alignments, and practically every rail line in New England is on one of these horrible curvy alignments, although they've been mildly improved over the centuries.

The second stage of eastern rail lines, built from the 1850s onward, is the one which gave us all the well-engineered cutoffs. This also built the "eastern midwest" lines west of the Appalachians, and most of the lines south of the Mason-Dixon line (the old lines in that area having been largely destroyed in the Civil War).

Then, the rail system was so overbuilt that the original rail lines were mostly dismantled outside New England (where few cutoffs were built due to high population density and early NIMBYs). The number of old dreadfully engineered lines removed from New Jersey over the years is enormous -- and that's before they started removing some of the *good* lines.

The number of old dreadfully engineered lines removed from New Jersey over the years is enormous -- and that's before they started removing some of the *good* lines.

Totally undocumented rumor...

The Morris and Essex lines are where they are because of NIMBYs. The farmers in Clinton Township ( Today's Irvington and parts of western Newark ) didn't want the train coming through their farmland. The stagecoach company was against it too.

The lovely little curves south of Elizabeth are there because someone didn't want to sell so they had to curve around...

A few really stupid things still floating around too because of competition between the railroads.